Emily Miller Budick, The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. x + 250 pp.

This chapter reviews the book The Subject of Holocaust Fiction (2015), by Emily Miller Budick. In The Subject of Holocaust Fiction, Budick is not concerned with positions that denigrate or problematize Holocaust literature as moral or epistemological failure. Instead, she claims that Holocaust fiction has too often been taken by both ordinary readers and critics as quasi-authentic representations of the experiences of the victims of Nazism, as near-equivalents of survivor memoirs, or as witnesses through the imagination. Budick argues that we need to restore literariness to our appreciation of Holocaust fiction and insists that the subject of Holocaust fiction is subjectivity itself, the complex humanity of its characters, of the text itself, and perhaps most significantly, of its readers.